Public Statements

Floor Speech

Mr. PASCRELL. Mr. Speaker, I heard the words a few moments ago about a grab bag. I can assure you that the Governors who introduced itemized lists went into them very deeply with the consultation of local officials. It's no grab bag. That's an insult to the northeastern States that were hit by this tremendous storm. And it's ironic, of those who oppose this legislation, that many of them--and I have the list here, Mr. Speaker, if you want to see it--supported not only disaster aid for their own areas, but some of them got disaster aid personally. The gentleman from South Carolina, he personally took a small business loan, Federal loan, as part of a disaster relief program, yet he comes here and to the Rules Committee to question what we're submitting?

I want to say to the chair and the ranking person in the Rules Committee, you did a good job yesterday. Going through 92 amendments, I don't know how you did it. Of course you dismissed some of them pretty quickly, which was very good. I also want to say, Mr. Rogers and Mr. Cole and Louise Slaughter have been particularly outstanding, along with Rodney Frelinghuysen's amendment, which I will definitely support.

There are two towns wiped out in my district: Little Ferry and Moonachie. Water came over the banks because of the surge. Thank God we didn't have that much rain or else we would have had a far worse disaster.

We stood on this floor after Katrina and voice voted billions of dollars--voice voted. We didn't even take an individual vote.

I think that the record is very clear on what is needed. We have taken out the extraneous and we've taken out what we call earmarks, and I think that those who put this legislation together deserve a tremendous amount of credit.